


And all the trees were bread and cheese

by lotesse



Series: If all the world were apple pie and all the sea were ink [3]
Category: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Canon Backstory, F/M, Family, Name Changes, Names, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 06:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20559572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: She had been living on Gont for twelve years – long enough to think of herself as Goha, even in the privacy of her own thoughts – before she found reason to travel to the village of Ten Alders. Apple was eight years old, Spark just six, and there was much to do to pack them up with all their accoutrements before she could undertake the journey.





	And all the trees were bread and cheese

She had been living on Gont for twelve years – long enough to begin to think of herself as _Goha_, as she was called there, even in the privacy of her own thoughts – before she found reason to travel to the village of Ten Alders. It was not a large village, nor a prosperous; but there was a merino wool there that she wanted for the children's underclothes, and Ten Alders, she heard from Lark, was the best place to come by such a thing. Apple was eight years old, Spark just six; and there was much to do to pack them up with all their accoutrements before she could undertake the journey. 

It was Fan the Weaver who had given her the name, to begin with; and there had been something fitting about it, in his gentle mouth, the worker in threads perhaps recognizing a kinship with the girl who had lived so long spinning webs in the dark. And when she had started to take her restless flights from Ogion's eyrie, the girl-woman looking for the starting thread of her life going out from Re Albi, she had taken that name with her as a concealing cloak. It had been one thing to hear her true name like a bell through the silent darkness of the Labyrinth; it was quite another to wear it into Gont Port. Lady Tenar of the Ring was a girl from a story; she wanted to be real, and solid, and multidimensional. And the multidimensional complicated women of Gont's cities and villages and the settlements all around the Archipelago kept their true names hidden. So too would she do.

So she had given her name to Lark as Goha, and Lark had introduced her as Goha to Flint, and Flint had never made a motion to discover her true name. She did not volunteer it; she had no experience in the ritual intimacy of lovers sharing names as tender secrets, and she'd taken Flint's lack of interest as instructive. In South Valley, at Flint's farm, where the complicated people of Gont lived out their multidimensional lives, people didn't intuit one's true name by magery. True names mattered less than social gossip, who was sleeping with who and who had got with child again, and whose husband was a drunkard, and who had been taken up for piracy or counterfeiting.

After a while, she had become so good at being Goha that she'd almost forgotten she'd ever been anyone else.

*

While she was occupied in the marketplace at Ten Alders, Spark, following the erratic impulses of his baby heart, toddled away from her, abandoning the string she'd brought to keep them connected along the way; and she and Apple had both been so focused on plans for clothes for the next seasons that it had been a moment or two before the boy's absence had been noticed. A scramble followed, until she found her youngest a short distance away.

In the typical fashion of Spark's young life, he had found a fascinating subject to fixate on: an old man sitting outside an alehouse with his friends, red-faced with drink and happy to talk. The child stood slack-mouthed in front of the gesticulating man, eyes wide and hungry in his pinched, pale little face.

“... and the mists came in from the sea, you've seen them, laddie, like ghosts thick in the air. In the mist came at the boy's command, and hid all of the men from one another, villager from Karg, Karg from villager. The Kargs had no idea what to do, but the villagers, well. They knew their place. They slaughtered those pillaging white savages, and the boy, they do say, went on to become a great mage: Sparrowhawk, the Archmage of Roke.”

Spark would clearly have listened to an hour more of this, but the storyteller finally took note of her, Goha the white spider, a farmwife clad in the familiar Gontish fashion, but a Karg herself by her pale face and hands. 

She reached out for her child, chiding familiarly, “Spark, you shouldn't stray like that. Come back with your sister and me.” She knew it would make little difference – she could no more keep Spark from straying than tether a cloud – but she felt it necessary to go through the motions, as a bare minimum.

The drunk man, the storyteller, appeared abashed, caught in some sort of social failure. Speaking to her son without her being present, maybe, or perhaps it was the harsh words about Kargish people he'd spoken, not realizing the racialized source of Spark's pallor, that he was worrying about. Spark, after all, was half-Gontish by his father, and his complexion could pass for an unhealthy Gontish if his mother wasn't nearby to betray his mixed origins.

“My apologies, mistress,” the man said.

She was not listening, was not really thinking about the social situation of the moment, the straying child, the careless-mouthed man, at all. Sparrowhawk, she had heard him say, and in her head she heard the true name that went with it: _Ged_. And then, in her mind's ear, the remembered sound of his voice: _Take care, Tenar._ Her ears rang with it, just as they had then, in the deep underground darkness of the only home she had, until that moment of terrible transformation, ever known.

She made her mouth shape polite nothings, and grabbed her wayward Spark by the shoulder to steer him back to the market stall where Apple, good girl that she was, stood steadfastly waiting. But the impact of the story was like a struck bell, indeed, and it continued to shake her with great rolling vibrations long after the initial blow.

“I didn't know the Archmage came from this village,” Spark said after a moment, seeming as he sometimes did to eerily echo her most inward thoughts.

“Yes,” she managed to answer.

“Do you think his mother and father still live here? That man said Sparrowhawk was the blacksmith's son.”

“We could ask,” she said. “We'll look for lodgings in Ten Alders for the night, and make the journey home tomorrow.”

He was diverted by Apple then, telling his adventure over to his unimpressed big sister in his high piping excited voice, and so she escaped from further questioning, for the moment at least. But after she'd finished her business, and secured them a private room to sleep in for the night, and bought them soup and bread to eat for their supper, there was little left she could do but listen to their chatter, and be periodically drawn into it.

They sat at a corner table in a public house, the children hotly debating. “The man told me so! He said that Sparrowhawk the Archmage was the littlest brother of the whole family.”

“And you're just going to believe whatever he tells you?”

“About someone from his own village? You just bet I am! You're only jealous that you didn't hear the story, too.”

And then it was Apple, in her turn, solid, dependable Apple, who was getting her mother into troubled waters of memory. Apple, seeking better sourced information, who asked of the publican, “Is it true that Sparrowhawk the Archmage lived here as a boy, and called the mist?”

“Indeed it is,” came the response back from the publican's cheery broad red lips. “His brothers live here still! The Archmage is too important for goat farming, though, so he doesn't visit much. Duny, he was called as a boy, here, before he went away up to live with the old mage Ogion. Not Sparrowhawk until later.”

She hadn't known that; another secret name, not a true name, but a piece of the true man, the name of his babyhood, boyhood, innocency. “Does he never come home to his mother?” she found herself asking aloud, joining in Apple's questioning.

“No ma'am, she died when he was a little thing. His father is yet living, and one of the older sons runs the smithy now; but we don't see any more of the Archmage than any plain village, despite the tall tales that some of the locals like to tell.”

Why had she never thought about Ged's childhood, his family? She had known, when he had brought her from Atuan to Havnor, from Havnor to Gont, that he was bringing her back to the island that had been his first and earliest home. But they had gone straight to Re Albi, to the high house where Ogion lived in windswept solitude, and that had always been the place she had associated with Ged. Where he had brought her, where he had left her, where the silent man who was surrogate father to both of them still resided. But of course, he had to have had a mother, and a father in the more biological sense, and a babyhood use-name in the years before he had learned to call the raptors of the skies down to perch on his outstretched arm.

She had not realized, until she'd borne and begun to raise her own children, just how strange and strictured her early years had been in Atuan, amongst the women and eunuchs of the tombs. Apple's small social struggles and Spark's perpetual mild troublemaking and disobedience, all located within the secure nested worlds of family, farm, village, island society, were worlds away from the haughty grandeur, political backbiting, and aching boredom that had characterized her childhood as the Eaten One. Arha's memories had been no help to her; she'd had to start over, a slate wiped clean.

She had tried to borrow the Gontish social pattern-weave, it appearing strong and firm to her inexperienced eyes. It was where he had brought her, at the end of their journey together: the place where Sparrowhawk, Ged, had found for her to be planted and begin to bloom. But, she realized as she sat in the gathering evening with her two small children, there in the village where he had been born and first blooded, and had not returned, she hadn't considered why he had always been departing. Always, Ged had been going away from Gont; and there she was, a Gontish farmwife with her passing Gontish children. Far from feeling called into herself, she felt alienated; as though she were floating several feet above her body, seeing everything from outside and away.

“His father must be proud,” she said.

“Well, mistress, that's a complicated matter. You know how families are.”

“Yes,” she answered, still distant, disembodied. “Yes, I know how they are.” And she wondered, as she said it, if it were true.


End file.
